I’ve attended several bridal shows here in Houston, and meeting the brides face to face is a great way to get good business from attending a bridal show. Usually you get to meet the bride face to face, discuss some of the elements of your services to them and you are either a good fit together or you don’t offer the right service for that particular bride. If it’s a great match, you have classified the bride and/or the bride has classified you as a potential wedding vendor for their wedding day.

Most of the time, meeting the bride in person is all you need to seal the deal, however, if they are currently interested in 2 or more wedding vendors, then they usually opt to go home and review their notes or the wedding vendors’ marketing material.

Guess what one place they are sure to go? Your website!

There are 8  ways to use the power of your website, to finish convincing your bride that they should chose your service over your competition.

Before I move on to listing these, please read the following warning!

WARNING!!

Although, you collected a whole lot of leads at the bridal show, there is one place of concern that you should be aware of and that is… Spamming the brides’ email addresses.

The spam laws are getting tougher and tougher, more online services are cracking down on email spam and more reports are being placed on illegal use of email.

So what is spam?

According to the web site, SpamLaws.com, Spam is…

The term spam refers to submitting the same message to a large group of individuals in an effort to force the message onto people who would otherwise choose not to receive this message.

You may think that you are saving time by sending a mass email to these brides, and although you did get their email address in a valid manner, you may still get in trouble for sending them a mass email with your services and information if they report you.

So what are the 8 ways to (safely) convert your bridal show leads into clients using the power of your website?

1. Include a Double Opt-in system to get their email addresses.

   The first thing you should do is have a double opt-in system in place so that you can avoid the spam laws. By having a double opt in system in your site, you can guarantee yourself and the bride that they indeed were the ones that submitted their email address on your website. The way a double opt-in system works is like this. A bride visits your website and submits their information, now at this point, it could be anyone, not just her. The double opt-in system sends a confirmation email to the bride’s email address, and since only that bride has access to her email address, she can confirm that it was indeed her that wanted to join your email list. See more information about Double Opt-ins here. A good service to use is Awebber.com.

2. Have a tactically designed, series of emails for  your brides.

   This one require brain power and planning and is a combination of marketing and sales techniques. You’ve already met the bride, you already know they stopped by your booth and are somewhat interested, by this point, you already have her committed to joining your list (Step 1), so use those facts to your advantage. This series of emails should be automated and I would recommend a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 10. The sole purpose of these emails are to compel your bride to make an effort to make an appointment with you or to get them to call you. For example, Email 1 may be a thank you for joining your list and a remainder of what website they signed up from. Email 2 may be a remainder that you met at a recent bridal show and that you want to thank them for stopping by but by this point you want to compel them to reply to your email so that you can engage them in an email conversation. Email 3 may be a remainder that there is a limited amount of time for them to use the ‘discount’ or asking for the best time to call them. Most importantly you want to compel your email user to act or to get into your office. Again, a great tool to use to set up these emails on autopilot is Awebber.com.

3. Set up a Web Page dedicated to that bridal show and place it on your fliers.

   The previous 2 steps work best if you take the time to complete this one. What you want to do here is set up a completely hidden page that the only way they can access it is if they have one of your fliers or literature that you passed out during the bridal show that you attended. For example, in January of 2008, the last time I attended the bridal extravaganza, I tried this out and set up a page at http://www.fhpentertainment.com/be-offer. I put that in all my post cards that I passed out and I was able to track exactly how many brides came to my website from the Bridal Extravaganza Show. In order to get them to join my list, I held a raffle and offered some really good incentives for them to join. This worked like a charm.  Exactly 107 Bridal Extravaganza Brides Visited that website. And to this day there are people that for some reason or another land on that website. It is not indexed by the search engines, it is not linked to by anyone or anything else, in fact this is only the first time I make this information public.

4. Have a Discount Coupon.

   Brides are looking to save money, whether giving coupons are for you or not, this is a great ides to have a coupon that they can print out and take to you. Again, the purpose of these ideas are to get brides to visit you or to call you to make an appointment to visit you. This may work with any or all of the ideas mentioned before.

5. Have a contact form on your page.

   If you use Awebber.com, the generation of a contact for can be made easily for you. But you don’t have to use Awebber.com, you could simply  have your programmer create one for you, however, I find it extremely difficult to keep up with all the different inquiries that may come from your page if you don’t use a service like Awebber.com to manage your list. Not to mention that you can have it to where once they enter their information into your contact form, and they confirm their email address, your tactfully designed series of emails will automatically start for you. It’s all automated.

6. Give them something of value for their information.

   The great internet marketers always say; “Give your best stuff for free.” Well, you can’t give your information for free, but you can give SOME of the knowledge that will help them for free. Create a Free report and publicize it. On your report you want to include information that may aid the bride in planning her wedding. You may not realize it now, but giving away free information is a great way to establish your self as a leader in your field. I believe the biggest success of my website is that my blog is so focused on giving away great, and sometimes not so great, information to my brides.  This starts to instill a sense of trust, a sense of understanding, and a sense of compassion for me as a human being. Besides isn’t one of the most popular laws of humanity is to give?

7. Have a tactfully designed Sales letter (sales copy) in place.

   This is very important. If your material on your web page or website does not do a good enough job to compel the user to take action, you will lose out on a once in a lifetime opportunity to convert a bride to a client. Now sometimes the brides does plan to use your service regardless of what your sales copy is on your page, but most of the time, if you put a lot of effort into creating great sales copy, you will get the brides that were somewhat leaning towards your competition. Writing great sales copy is not easy, it requires effort. If you were going to do 1 out theses 8 steps, this is the one that I would concentrate most of my efforts on. Writing great sales copy on a page requires you to 1. gain the trust of your bride, 2. tell her how you are going to fix her problems, and 3. establish yourself as the best person that can fix her problems.  Now this is hard because you don’t have any contact with the bride during the sales process, you leave it up to your carefully designed sales letter to do all the talking for you. And remember, the bride is probably not coming back if you don’t do a good job of addressing how you will be fixing her problems.

8. Add Media to your Pages.

   Media is relatively new, there are very few to no wedding vendors using media. This is a great thing because there is no established model for ’selling’ your services by the use of video or audio on your website. Also, audio or video is actually easier to do, since you can most of the time just talk about what you want to talk about, where as in writing you have to make sure your spelling is correct, your punctuations is correct and that your grammar is correct. Not to mention that it takes longer to write as opposed to talking about it. Again, your audio has to serve a specific purpose, and that is to inform the bride of your services, thank them for visiting your page after they visited your booth at the bridal show, etc…

These are 8 great ides you can use/combine to make sure that a large part of the brides you meet at a bridal show make their way into your booking calendar.

You don’t have to use all 8 and you can actually combine a few ides with other to get the best use of these ideas. And like I mentioned before, if you decide to just use one idea out of all these, make sure you select idea #7 and put a lot of time, effort, and money into it as it is probably the single best idea that you can use.  Make the front page of your website your sales letter and you will see how much power well written sales copy can convert your visitors into customers.

Happy Bloggin
|o| Simply Frank |o|

I’ve attended some luncheons ( like the Perfect Wedding Guide’s Luncheons in Houston and NACE Wedding Trends Luncheon also here in Houston) and networking meetings lately and always the question comes up… How do you  rank so well on the search engines. Do you pay someone to do that? no. Are you paying per click? no. So how do you do it??? I wish there was a simple answer I could give, but there isn’t. If I say SEO, then I would have to explain what SEO stands for, which is not the most exciting topic, I guess. But it ends up being the what the conversation turns into.

I am considering putting together a workshop for the Houston wedding vendors that may be interested, but I have to make it a limited amount, like 20 or 40. That’s pretty hard considering that the Houston Bridal Extravaganza claims to have over 600 vendors at their show!!! That’s not counting the ones who cannot make it to the show.

I’ve gone and recapped what are the steps that I took in getting into the search engines and then making sure I rank high for the search engine terms that I am going after. As well as WHAT to do with the traffic once it is on your website…

Most people think that; “Oh well, I have a website already, I’m done with my online marketing…” In reality, building a website is the very first step of your online marketing life…

Next you have to drive traffic, after you drive traffic you must compel them to contact you, after they contact you, you have to have a selling system and after they are sold, you must put them into a different category so that they don’t continue to receive your sales material.

This is what is called in the online marketing world as an funnel system. And the sole purpose of your funnel system is to try to get as many potential customers to the top of your funnel and get them to go through it completely.

It’s a funnel because you may start with, let’s just say 100, and in the end you will end up with 3, which in marketing a 3% conversion ratio is really, really good.

So if you are not getting a lot of online prospects, then guess what, you have to make sure more people can find your website or that you can send more people to your website so that the number of people that convert is much greater!

Which makes sense. Let’s continue to assume that your website is converting 3% of your total visitors.

If you send 100 people to your website and you are converting at 3% then you only get 3 clients.
If you send 200 people to your website and you are converting at 3%, well you now have 6 clients.

So that means that the more potential customers that come across your website, the more clients you will have. Agreed? Good.

So how do you get more potential customers to your webstie?

Well, some ways may be to include your website on your business cards and fliers and pass out a whoooooole lot of them to a whooooole lot of people.

Sound expensive? Yes but there may (or may not depending on whether or not they are well classified potential customers, simply handing out business cards to just anyone will do you no good) be a good Return on Investment (ROI) and in the end it may be worth it. But one thing is for sure, you have to spend a lot of money upfront.

Another option would be to put your website on all your magazine advertisements and other forms of media that you may advertise in. Again, it involves spending money up front and again could be very expensive. Most magazines start their rates at over one thousand dollars for a 1/4 or 1/8th of a page. $1,000 Dollars!!!! Yikes.

I am not saying that passing out business cards, fliers, or even advertising in magazines is bad… It’s actually a good thing…

but….

What if there was a way that you could advertise absolutely for free and you would have to pay NOOOO ONE!!?? EVER!!??

Sounds like a dream? an unreachable dream?

That’s what I thought back in 2004 when I first set my eyes in being at the top of the search engines.

Guess what, it’s not impossible, it’s not a dream…

It’s easily achievable by anyone that wants it bad enough…

For the last 5 years I’ve enjoyed the traffic that Google.com, Yahoo.com, and MSN.com send me for free.

All I had to do was learn a few steps, repeat them a few times, and viola, 5 years later, I’m still at the top of the search engines…

Feel free to see for yourselves…

(Website Name is www.fhpentertainment.com)

1. DJ in Houston #2 Position in Google Results
2. Houston Wedding DJ #1 Position in Google Results
3. Bilingual DJ in Houston #1 Position in Google Results
4. Wedding DJ in Houston #2 Position in Google Results

Now there are Hundreds of Search Engine Keywords that I have targeted. The above are just a few so you can get an idea of what you should be using as your keywords. And realize that I only used Google for 2 reasons: 1. It is the hardest one to rank for and 2. EVERYONE uses Google (Ok, not everyone just 70% of the US as of June 2008).

So again, maybe I’ll have a Workshop or Seminar in June sometime, but I really would be interested in knowing how to rank well for your targeted keywords.

Please let me know by submitting your name and your email address on the upper right hand side of this page… Right where it says… “Subscribe to our Newsletter”

And then you must confirm your subscription,  just to make sure someone else did not submit your address for you.

As you can judge by reading this blog, writing does not have to be your strongest point…

P.S. feel free to leave a comment below in addition to submitting your contact information above.